Daily news and top headlines for broadband communications engineering and design professionals

Virgin Media has thrown down the gauntlet against BT by announcing a five-year, $4.62 billion build out of its broadband network. Virgin Media has generally topped BT’s speeds in cities and towns across the UK where they compete against each other, but BT has enjoyed a larger broadband footprint.

Shaw Communications announced this week that it was closing its call centers in Calgary and Edmonton while also closing part of its operations in Kelowna. All told, 1,600 employees in those call centers will have to either re-locate, accept severance packages or take on new jobs at their current locations.

While the final numbers are still pending, ABI Research said in a report that the worldwide pay-TV market was expected to grow 5 percent in 2013 while topping 924.4 million subscribers. On a global scale, IPTV is the driving force behind the increased in subscribers.

Yahoo is on a path to generate a significant portion of its revenue from mobile. Yahoo Senior Vice President Adam Cahan on Thursday told Bloomberg Television that mobile advertising is set to fuel its new businesses and in turn generate half of the company's total revenue in the next 12 to 18 months.

Responding to unprecedented data breaches and cyberattacks, President Barack Obama is trying to spark alliances between policymakers who want to regulate the online world and tech innovators who traditionally shun Beltway bureaucracies. In California's Silicon Valley on Friday, Obama was participating in a White House summit on cybersecurity and consumer protection.

After making its national debut on Monday, Sling TV has sweetened its cord-cutting streaming service by offering deals on Roku and Amazon streaming sticks and devices. By aligning itself with Roku and Amazon, Sling TV has strengthened its appeal for cord-cutters who are looking to unbundle their video services from traditional pay-TV providers.

Charter Communications has beefed up its product and strategy team with the addition of three new employees as well as a promotion for another. Peter Brown was promoted to vice president, user experience design where he will be responsible for the development of user experiences for all of Charter’s customer-facing products.

NASCAR-owned Iowa Speedway and Mediacom Business announced a renewed partnership that will help the racetrack address growing bandwidth demand, onsite high speed Internet in the Mediacom Media Center, and high definition video powered by Mediacom Business.

Backed by investments from former AOL executives Steve Case and Ted Leonsis, as well as Comcast Ventures, ViewLift launched its “B2B” streaming video platform today. ViewLift is positioning itself as a “one-stop-shop” for creating, launching and monetizing video applications that are designed for distribution across various devices, including smartphones, TVs, tablets, over-the-top boxes and game consoles.

CEO David DeWalt of Silicon Valley cybersecurity firm FireEye refers to his digital investigators as "cyber SEALs" — as in Navy SEALs, not the cuddly sea mammals. When big corporations like Sony Pictures, JPMorgan Chase, Target or Anthem suffered malicious hacks and data breaches that threatened their operations and reputations, they called in FireEye.

Shares of Cisco Systems rose in aftermarket trading Wednesday after its fiscal second-quarter results surpassed Wall Street's expectations. The San Jose, California-based company also raised its quarterly dividend to 21 cents from 19 cents.

Sigfox has attracted $115 million in financing, some of which will be used to finance the deployment of a wireless network in the U.S. that will be dedicated to machine-to-machine (M2M) and other Internet of Things applications.

MVPDs and programmers can use the combined systems to deliver regionalized content such as sports or local programming to the right audience on any device. This Technology's SwitchStream alternate content delivery system is integrated with Harmonic's ProStream 9100 high-density stream processor.